In Microsoft Teams, a small icon resembling an eye appears next to your messages when the recipient has viewed them. While these read receipts can be helpful for confirming that important information has been seen, they can also create a false sense of urgency, pressuring you to reply to messages immediately even when you are busy. If you prefer to read messages on your own schedule without broadcasting your status to your colleagues, you can disable read receipts entirely.
How Microsoft Teams Read Receipts Work
Read receipts in Teams operate on a two-way system. If you turn off your read receipts, your coworkers will no longer see the eye icon when you read their messages. However, you will also lose the ability to see if they have read the messages you send to them. The feature is universally active across all your one-on-one and group chats (up to 20 people), but turning it off does not affect your standard presence indicator (Available, Busy, Away).
How to Turn Off Read Receipts (Desktop and Web)
You can easily disable this feature from the main settings menu in the Teams desktop application or the web browser version.
- Open Microsoft Teams on your computer.
- Click the three-dot menu icon (Settings and more) located in the top right corner, right next to your profile picture.
- Select Settings from the dropdown menu.
- In the left-hand sidebar of the Settings window, click on Privacy.
- Under the Read receipts section, locate the toggle switch.
- Click the toggle to turn it Off.
The change takes effect immediately. The eye icon will no longer appear in any of your chat histories, replaced only by a simple checkmark indicating that the message was successfully delivered to the server.
Can IT Administrators Force Read Receipts?
If you navigate to the Privacy menu and discover that the Read receipts toggle is greyed out or completely missing, it means your organization’s IT department has enforced a global policy. Enterprise administrators have the ability to lock read receipts to either “Always On” or “Always Off” for the entire company. If this is the case, you cannot override the setting locally and must contact your IT administrator if you wish to request a policy exception.